Reading and writing from conventional tapes and disk drives involves mechanical motion of a read/write head(s) and/or media. Reading and writing from a solid state drive (SSD) does not involve mechanical motion. However, garbage collection and defragmentation of SSDs may be performed using techniques based on conventional tape and disk drive approaches that accounted for the mechanical movement of the read/write head. Thus, garbage collection and defragmentation of SSDs may produce inefficient bottlenecks that consume unnecessary, inappropriate or undesirable amounts of time, processor cycles, and energy.
An SSD, which may also be referred to as a solid-state disk, is a data storage device that uses integrated circuits as memory to store data. An SSD may have no moving parts (e.g., read/write heads), which distinguishes an SSD from a conventional spinning disk drive. An SSD may use NAND-based flash memory that retains data without power.
A shingled magnetic recording (SMR) drive is a drive that employs shingled magnetic recording to improve capacity on a hard disk drive magnetic storage. A conventional hard disk drive writes data in non-overlapping magnetic tracks that run parallel to each other. SMR drives write data in tracks that overlap part of a previously written magnetic track. The overwriting may leave the previous track thinner than it was before being partially overwritten, which may in turn increase track density. While overlapping tracks may increase density, writing data so that it partially overlaps a previously written track may be slower and may require some tracks to be rewritten. Garbage collection and defragmentation of SMR drives may be performed using techniques based on conventional disk drive approaches. Thus, garbage collection and defragmentation of SMR drives may also produce inefficient bottlenecks that consume unnecessary, inappropriate or undesirable amounts of time, processor cycles, and energy.
A user or organization may have a large number of tapes. The tapes may be actual tapes or may be virtual tapes stored in a virtual tape library. The user or organization may wish to back up or transport that large number of tapes. Conventionally, backing up or transporting a large number of tapes would require accessing a sufficient number of physical tapes for the backup or transport. When disk based technology was used to back up a tape, the conventional disk based approach may not have been able to aggregate and then control the location to which data for one tape was written.